Time does fly. It has already been two weeks since my previous blog post, so I guess an update is in order. The support for shine-through directories and the package links has been implemented as planned and works nicely as far as I have tested them. Other than that I've worked on a few odds and ends.

Haiku, Inc. is ecstatic to announce
Michael Lotz (AKA "mmlr") on a 6 month contract developing Haiku!!
There is the intention to renew this contract for another 6 months,
making Michael to be the first person to be paid to work on Haiku for an
entire year and you can make that a reality!

The goal of his contract would be to work on anything and everything
to bring Haiku closer to its first production quality release, better known
as "R1". The scope, variety and quality of code that Michael has produced
over the past six years and even more recently, gives Haiku, Inc. the fullest
confidence in his ability to succeed in every task that he works on.
Simply put, Michael gets the job done and done right.

After a week of working on the package management support as per my contract with Haiku, Inc., I have reached my first milestone: The base system is packaged... and it boots again. Here's a short account of what I have been doing exactly and what I'm up to next.

The Haiku Project is excited to announce the availability
of our third official alpha release. A year and a month have passed since
the Alpha 2 and the Haiku Project has been busy. The main purpose of this
release is to provide interested third party developers with a stable version
for testing and development. To aid with that, Haiku includes a rich set of
development tools.

On the Haiku, Inc. mailing list, Ingo Weinhold proposed a development contract.
You may know Ingo better by his commit id "bonefish", as he recently merged his POSIX signals development branch back into trunk as r42116.
His proposal is for 160 hours relating to furthering package management with a €2,000 EUR payout.
That is roughly a meager $18 USD per hour!

As many have likely noticed, our trusty mailing lists hosted on freelists.org are currently down.

It seems freelists.org is having some kind of critical DNS issue which hasn't yet been resolved. We have been unable to find out much info beyond that. If anyone has more details, please feel free to mention it in the comments.

However, since Haiku has a *lot* of mailing lists on freelists.org, this does drastically impact development and community discussion, we may have to relocate our mailing lists to another service if the problem doesn't get resolved soon.

We will be sure to let everyone know here if/when that occurs.

Thanks for you patience!

Update: The FreeLists server is up again and delayed mails are being delivered.